Writer and director Guillermo del Toro has built his career on monster movies. He’s filled them with the Pale Man, the Crimson Woman, a fish man, all creatures you don’t want to find yourself alone with at night. And yet, time and again, del Toro shows us that the real monsters, the things that should scare us the most, are our fellow humans.

Nightmare Alley is del Toro’s first feature without any sort of supernatural/fantasy elements. Stan (Bradley Cooper) stumbles into the life of a carny. He’s leaving behind a dead body in a house he set aflame, and he starts anew as cheap labor tearing down carnival tents. He immediately becomes enamored of Molly (Rooney Mara), who has an electrocution act in the carnival. Stan is taken under the wings of Zeena (Toni Collette) and Pete (David Strathairn), two mentalists who ultimately give Stan an idea for his own show with Molly.

After leaving the carnival and going out on their own, Stan and Molly perform an act that’s essentially medium work. Stan pretends that he’s able to commune with the spirits with Molly’s help. They use codewords and gestures so that even though Stan is blindfolded, they’re able to communicate right in front of the audience. Molly is adamant that they don’t turn into a “spook show,” meaning, should an audience member come to them after the show and want to further communicate with their deceased loved one, they explain how the trick is done. Stan doesn’t see the harm in continuing the ruse but giving people hope and something to believe based on a lie is dangerous. People get drunk on the idea of hope, the possibility of things going their way. It’s intoxicating.

During one of their performances, Stan and Molly meet Dr. Lilith Ritter (Cate Blanchett), a psychiatrist who’s initially skeptical of their act. After impressing her by being able to discern the contents of her bag without the help of Molly’s codewords, Stan forms a partnership with Lilith and doesn’t include Molly. Lilith feeds him information from her sessions to use with the people he’s doing medium work for. All of a sudden, Stan is getting massive payments from some of the most influential people in the city. They’re running a spook show at an exorbitant rate. It’s interesting to watch the way hope twists into something worse than having no hope at all.

Visually, the film is stunning. The carnival sets are immersive and the perpetual rolling thunderstorm backdrop gives the entire first half of the film an otherworldly feel. It is eerie and unsettling in the best way. Unfortunately, the story never really goes anywhere. It’s a beautiful thing to look at, but it lacks substance. There’s an emptiness that isn’t usually felt in del Toro movies. Perhaps it’s because the film and some of the effects (like Molly’s electrocution bolts of lightning) feel overly stylized. Del Toro is going for a noir style, but it’s too glossy and lacks his trademark grittiness.

Another bit of trouble comes from too many characters vying for screen time without any of them offering real depth. All the audience knows about Molly is that she likes to read and she likes chocolate, but she probably has the second-largest amount of screen time. We don’t even really get a sense of why she’s willing to run away with Stan from the carnival life she knows well and seems to genuinely enjoy. It doesn’t help that the chemistry between Mara and Cooper is pretty nonexistent. Blanchett and Richard Jenkins get to really shine in their roles, but they show up when the movie feels like it should already be winding down.

Nightmare Alley is about greed and charismatic authority, two things synonymous with America. It feels like it’s supposed to be an American historical fable, and had the film leaned more toward that image, it could have thrived. The country has long had a fascination with the enigmatic start-up entrepreneur. That’s the role Stan is playing, and one he excels in. From the first performance he puts on at the carnival to try to avoid a police shutdown, to his last, grandest scheme, everyone’s eyes are on him. Even under pressure, he knows what needs to be done to sell the illusion. It’s an admirable feat and explains why he’s able to amass the following he does.

One storyline in the film offers a glimpse of the dark side of hope. It’s gruesome, and comes out of nowhere, in a moment where the audience isn’t expecting anything to happen. In a movie bloated with soulless filler scenes and too much exposition, the scenes with Mary Steenburgen stand out as what this movie could have been. Early on, the man who teaches Stan his illusions is talking about spook shows and says that “it ain’t hope if it’s a lie.” That should have been the guiding thesis statement for this movie. Examine what hope and lies do to a person — the person who’s telling the lies and the person who’s listening and believing those lies as if their life depends on it.

All the parts of this movie add up to something that just doesn’t work. It’s a series of rights adding up to a wrong. If you isolate the performances and the score and the production design, you see top-of-the-line results. There’s not even anything wrong with the writing or the dialogue in the script. It might have worked if thirty minutes had been cut, or if an hour had been added to make it into a miniseries. It’s almost as if there was a predetermined length for the movie and characters and scenes were strung together until the magic number of minutes was met. There is no cohesion, no character arc or overall theme strong enough to bring it all together and create something meaningful.

It’s disappointing to see a movie like this that’s interesting enough to keep viewers hanging on, hoping the next scene is going to turn it all around, but it never does. It’s a spook show–telling the audience lies and letting them believe there’s hope.

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